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John Nold

An avid bicyclist and hiker, who once spent a month walking 200 miles across England with his wife, John Nold is a professor emeritus who often found ways to incorporate interesting real-life experiences into his classroom discussions. It is a rare occasion, for example, when a faculty member can talk about how he roasted a hot dog over a creeping lava flow in Hawaii, but that’s the type of anecdote you may hear if you sat in one of his courses.

The professor emeritus of geology touched the lives of students for 36 years as a faculty member at UCM. He arrived on campus as an assistant professor in 1975, having previous experiences that included about seven years working for Cominco American, a mining company in Spokane, Wash., and briefly teaching a summer field course for the University of Missouri at a field station at Lander, Wyo. His work as a geologist ranged from oil exploration in Kansas and heading up a mapping crew for massive sulfide deposits in Alaska, to evaluating a gold district in Montana.

While climbing the faculty ranks, he spent more than 15 years as coordinator of the Earth Science Program, was involved in activities such judging at Science Day and the Science Olympiad, and taking students on field trips, sometimes on his own time and expense. He made many contributions to professional scholarly journals.

Nold has been actively involved in a number of professional organizations such as the Missouri Academy of Science, Geological Society of America, and Association of Missouri Geologists. He is a Fellow of the Society of Economic Geologists.

In preparation for his professional career, Nold earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Missouri-Columbia. He earned his doctorate in geology at the University of Montana.